Bing Improves Voice Recognition Capabilities for Windows Phone

Windows Phone users may have noticed some improvements to the voice capabilities on their handsets, as Microsoft has been rolling out updates to its Windows Phone users over the last few weeks. The updates to the Bing voice search software have brought improved speed and accuracy to Windows Phone, and can now return search results up to twice as fast as before the improvements were made.

“By coupling MSR’s major research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with the large datasets provided by Bing’s massive index, the DNNs were able to learn more quickly and help Bing voice capabilities get noticeably closer to the way humans recognize speech. We also made a few improvements under the hood that allowed Bing to more easily identify speech patterns and cut through ambient and background noise – cutting down response time by half and improving the word error rate by 15 percent, even in noisy situations.” – Bing Speech Team

The Bing team has been working closely with Microsoft Research to improve speed and accuracy of the Bing voice capabilities. The two teams developed a technology called DNN, or Deep Neural Networks which can detect patterns in a way that resembles the way biological systems process information.

Windows Phone users should see the Bing voice improvements now, and can expect to see more improvements to come.